How conflict photos create the truth

“I joined the protest after seeing the photo of Abu Sayed.”

This is what I get to hear almost every time I talk to a July protester for the first time. For many Bangladeshis, the image needs no introduction. Abu Sayed stands with his arms stretched wide, facing the police before him. Moments later, he is shot dead.

The photograph and footage of his final moments spread rapidly across Bangladesh. For many who saw them, they became symbols of courage, anger and resistance.

Other images from the July uprising had a similar impact: Shahid Nafiz lying on a rickshaw as the puller desperately tries to take him away from the police; a young woman standing in front of a prison van, trying to stop it from taking away her brothers. For people, these are just some normal pictures, but for protesters, it was more than that. These images sparked the anger, which later turned into action for the uprising.

This is how photography enters history. It not only freezes moments, sometimes it becomes evidence, symbol of resistance or tool of propaganda after the shutter closes. It is not something new; it started more than a century ago.

The history of conflict photography

During the Crimean War in the 1850s, photographers such as Roger Fenton travelled to the battlefield and produced some of the earliest extensive photographic records of a war. A decade later, photographers such as Alexander Gardner documented the American Civil War, including the bodies of soldiers at Antietam. For the first time, large audiences could see the physical reality of war rather than relying only on written accounts or artists' illustrations.

But governments soon understood that cameras could serve them as well. During the World Wars, photographs were subjected to censorship and used to shape public morale and portray the enemy. By the Vietnam War, however, the relationship between photography and conflict had changed again. Independent photojournalists could bring images of violence directly into people's homes. Eddie Adams's 1968 photograph of a South Vietnamese police chief executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street became one of the defining images of the war, exposing audiences far from the battlefield to its brutality.

Today, the camera is no longer limited to professional photographers. A smartphone can turn a protester, bystander or victim into a witness. The technology has changed dramatically. The fundamental question has not: what happens when people can see what is happening in a war?

When images become evidence

One of the most important roles of conflict photography is turning an event that can be denied into something that must be examined. The photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, taken by American personnel in 2003 and 2004, became public evidence of prisoner abuse and led to investigations and criminal proceedings. The existence and proliferation of the images made it much harder to keep the abuse hidden.

Photography can also change how distant audiences understand a conflict. During the Vietnam War, images such as Nick Ut's photograph of children fleeing a napalm attack brought the consequences of the war into homes around the world. The photograph became part of a broader body of journalism that shaped public debate about the conflict. It would be too simple to say that one photograph ended the war, but its impact demonstrated how an image can influence how people understand events they have never witnessed themselves.

During the July uprising , Images and videos of killings, injuries and violence circulated while tensions were esclating. Footage of Abu Sayed being shot became one of the most recognisable visual records of the uprising. Later, photographs and videos collected by archives and investigators helped preserve evidence that could be examined after the events themselves had passed.

The same image that exposes violence can also be manipulated, selectively presented or used as propaganda. A photograph can therefore become evidence but its meaning depends on who took it, what it shows, what it leaves outside the frame, and how it is presented.

The risks of bearing witness

If photographs can expose violence, then the person holding the camera can become important too. In conflicts around the world, journalists and photographers have faced arrest, intimidation, injury, and death while documenting events. A camera can preserve evidence that authorities or armed groups may want to control, and the person operating it can become a witness who is difficult to silence.

Since the genocide began in Gaza in October 2023, dozens of Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed while reporting on the conflict. By the end of 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists had documented 85 journalists and media workers killed in the Israel-Gaza war during that year alone, with the vast majority Palestinian. CPJ says the killings, alongside restrictions on media access, internet shutdowns and destruction of media organisations, severely restricted the ability to document the war.

Back in July, Hasan Mehedi, a reporter for Dhaka Times, was fatally shot on July 18 while covering clashes in Dhaka's Jatrabari area. Abu Taher Md Turab, a reporter for Daily Jalalabad and Daily Naya Diganta, was fatally shot on July 19 while covering a procession in Sylhet. CPJ also documented numerous other journalists being attacked, including photojournalist Jibon Ahmed, who said police fired lead pellets at journalists covering the protests. Some others were injured and some were arrested while documenting the protest.

These deaths show why controlling photographers is also as important as controlling journalists. Sometimes documenting becomes a powerful weapon against the establishment, and the person behind that has to pay for it.

When photography serves power

Governments and militaries have long understood that controlling images can help control how a conflict is understood. During the World Wars, photographs were censored and selected to maintain morale, promote patriotism, and portray the enemy in particular ways.

Adolf Hitler's official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, deliberately built a public image of Hitler through carefully selected photographs showing him with children, surrounded by adoring crowds and presenting him as a leader who represented ordinary Germans. The photographs were reproduced in newspapers, posters and photo books and became part of the Nazi propaganda machine.

In 1944, Nazi authorities carefully staged a visit by the International Red Cross to the Theresienstadt ghetto, arranging scenes that presented a false picture of life there. Photographs taken during the visit were therefore documenting something real but a reality deliberately constructed for the camera. The photograph may therefore be real while the story built around it is not.

During July 24’ as photographs and videos of police violence spread online, the Hasina government promoted a different account of the unrest, describing the movement as having been “infiltrated and diverted” by opposition and anti-liberation forces and linking it to widespread violence. When the state forces were killing students, the state-powered media was showing pictures of vandalised metro rail or the burnt BTV buildings.

The ethics of conflict photography

What’s the ethical POV?

We have already seen how a photograph can bring the reality of war into people's homes. But what happens when the photograph itself creates an ethical dilemma? I want to return to Nick Ut's 1972 photograph to find the answer.

Nine-year-old Kim Phúc was naked and severely burned when Ut photographed her. The image initially faced resistance because of the child's nudity, but it was eventually published and became one of the defining photographs of the Vietnam War. Decades later, Facebook removed the image in 2016 for violating its rules on child nudity before reversing the decision after international criticism.

The controversy raises a difficult question: when does the public interest outweigh privacy?

There is another dilemma: should a photographer photograph suffering or intervene? Kevin Carter's 1993 photograph of a starving Sudanese child near a vulture became one of the most recognisable images of famine. Carter faced intense criticism from people who believed he should have helped rather than photographed. After just 14 months of taking the photograph, Carter committed suicide. The criticism exposed a tension at the heart of conflict photography: the photographer is expected to witness suffering, but is also a human being witnessing it.

The subjects themselves rarely get to decide what their image becomes. Kim Phúc did not consent to becoming a global symbol. Abu Sayed did not choose to have his final moments replayed across Bangladesh.

An image can therefore preserve someone's suffering while also taking ownership of that moment away from them. That is the ethical burden of war photography: the fact that an image is important does not automatically answer whether it is right to publish it.

Abu Sayed’s photograph began as a record of a few seconds in Rangpur. It later travelled across screens, streets and conversations, becoming one of the defining images of July uprising. The journey from a moment to an image, from an image to evidence, and from evidence to memory captures the unusual power of conflict photography.

But the history of war photography also shows that a camera is not automatically neutral. The same photograph can expose violence, serve propaganda, become evidence, preserve history, or raise difficult questions about privacy and dignity. Its meaning can change depending on who takes it, who publishes it, and how audiences encounter it.